Babelgum Takes on YouTube

Startup company Babelgum is looking to challenge YouTube’s dominant role in the fast growing Internet video syndication and video sharing market.

Babelgum, founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia, is hoping to drum up interest in its Web site by featuring the latest short film of director Spike Lee called “Jesus Children of America”.

Erik Lumer, chief executive officer of Babel Networks, which operates Babelgum, said that they want to challenge YouTube by showing quality content. The deal to screen Lee’s latest film is an example of how the company wants to show better quality videos than the “cat playing piano” type of videos seen on [tag-ice]YouTube[/tag-ice], he said.

The Babelgum Web site is currently in beta testing. The site is looking to carry from 1,000 to 2,000 hours of video content when it officially opens, and 10,000 hours more later on.

This is part of what Babelgum state on their site at the moment.

‘Babelgum ushers in a new era for television, blending the lean-back experience of traditional TV with the interactive and social power of the Internet.’

In contrast to YouTube, Babelgum will provide a software that can be downloaded and installed into users’ machines. The software works like a TV remote that allows users to choose the content they want to watch. Another startup company, Joost, founded by the same people who developed Kazaa and Skype, offers a similar Internet TV service.

Babelgum founder Scaglia owns Fastweb, the second largest telecommunications company in Italy. I trust that Babelgum realizes that YouTube is not the only [tag-tec]video sharing[/tag-tec] site out there and other sites have plenty of quality video on them already.